Editorial: Case of the missing carnage

A police officer investigates a shooting at Dolores Park in San Francisco last month.

A police officer investigates a shooting at Dolores Park in San...

The Trump administration may want to make American carnage great again. But the nation’s penchant for violence and disorder simply isn’t what it used to be.

The U.S. crime rate over the first half of the year was on pace to drop nearly 2 percent from last year, New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice found in a newly released report, which would make 2017 one of the safest years in nearly a half-century.

That doesn’t square with the renewed law-and-order hysteria typified by Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ claim that “violent crime is back with a vengeance.” As the report’s authors put it, “These findings directly undercut any claim that the nation is experiencing a crime wave.”

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President Trump’s crime fixation began at the beginning, with the most macabre inaugural address since the one widely thought to have killed William Henry Harrison. Having declared an end to “the crime and the gangs and the drugs” that constitute “this American carnage,” Trump soon ordered up an office on crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, a task force on crime reduction, and more efforts to protect police officers. His attorney general went on to direct federal authorities to maximize charges and prosecutions, revive the abused practice of civil asset forfeiture, and threaten to crack down on marijuana in states that have legalized it.

And yet the nation’s overall crime rate, based on the Brennan Center’s analysis of police data from its 30 largest cities, is expected to decline 1.8 percent from last year. Violent crime is expected to be down 0.6 percent, and homicide is on track to drop 2.5 percent. Each of these measures is expected to be close to the low point since crime peaked around 1991.

To justify its alarmism, the administration has focused on increases in violent crime in 2015 and 2016, particularly according to the volatile measure of homicides in a few cities. Sessions asserted that this was not an “aberration or a blip” but a “dangerous permanent trend.” The facts so far suggest that he had it exactly wrong.

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